


legacy

by theformerone



Category: Naruto
Genre: First Shinobi World War, Fourth Shinobi War, Minor Original Character(s), Multi, Senju OCs to fill in the gaps, Third Shinobi World War, Warring States Period (Naruto), moegi is tobirama's great granddaughter because reasons, second shinobi world war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-02-28 22:01:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13280718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theformerone/pseuds/theformerone
Summary: When Edo Tensei is used to bring the Niidaime back to life, Moegi doesn't see it. She feels it.





	legacy

It months after the war ends that Noriko changes her last name.

She cannot look her mother in the face.

She knows what the war is taking from people. Can see it written on her fellow shinobi’s faces, can see it in the twitching backs of skittish merchants and civilians.

Noriko is seventeen and should be on the frontlines. She knows that her father and her uncle went into battle when they were much younger than she was. But she is a Senju, one of the precious few still alive. She and her cousins are symbols and they are invaluable to the spirit of Konoha. The Niidaime may fall in battle but his legacy must live. As must the Shodaime’s. As must the Senju’s.

During her uncle’s funeral, she held Hironori’s hand in one fist while Tsunade held the other. Hiro is twelve but his lip wobbles. Tsunade is four years old and bawling. Her father, Hironori’s brother Tetsuya is a man grown. He should be fighting in the war.

“It will only be a matter of time,” she hears Mito-oba-sama tell him. “You have the Wood Release and they need more men on the ground.”

They had wanted to give the Shodaime a massive burial, but the soldiers needed food more than they needed a funeral. Noriko thought it was difficult to rationalize putting one important man in the ground while others had to settle for field graves of hollow earth.

Noriko’s father becomes hokage. The Niidaime. There is no time for him to wear the robes or put on the hat. It may as well be a field promotion. Suddenly he is the most important man in Konoha. They pull him from the field to identify the body and to take the hat.

The cousins say that her uncle decreed that her father would succeed him as hokage. There are four of them, telling the same story. Noriko is a child but she is a shinobi. She knows that they may be lying, keeping power in her family’s hands.

Her father leaves the night her uncle is dead and buried. He is curt with them, his little family. Noriko can smell the blood on his clothes beneath his armor. Death clings to him like a shroud. She juts her chin out, refusing to be afraid.

He puts his hand on her cheek. He doesn’t tell her to be good. He doesn’t tell her to be strong either.

He only says, “I’ll be back soon.”

The war ends. He never comes home.

Senju Tobirama was many things. A teacher. A brother. A politician. An analyst. A father. A friend.

Senju Noriko is only a handful of things. Seventeen years old and angry.

Her father is dead. Her father is dead. Sarutobi Hiruzen is the hokage. The Sandaime. He tells Noriko and her mother that he sacrificed himself for his squadron.

Her mother accepts her father’s dog hands with the grace of a woman who was born during the Warring States Period. Death does not surprise Senju Genko. She welcomes it like a troublesome friend. Noriko wants to spit in its face.

She wants to fight. She has uncles who died younger than she was in the wars before she was born. And she knows that the hidden villages were founded to stop that happening. Knows peace between clans and states would make sure child soldiers never had to enter the field again.

But Noriko is Senju Tobirama’s firstborn and she wants blood. Kumogakure blood.

Sarutobi will not let her onto the battlefield.

No one, no one that sees her white hair and her tidy kimono will let her more than ten meters outside of the Senju compound. Even civilians jostle her back to its safety.

“Come, Senju-sama, isn’t your mother worried?”

“You must get back inside Senju-sama.”

“Senju-sama, what are you doing outside of the compound?”

Her mother tries to tell her that it is an honor, to be too important to fight. Noriko wants to know why her father wasn’t too important. Why other children from noble clans weren’t too important. She bites down on her temper (her father’s temper) and remains silent.

Noriko knows that nobody is too important to die.

She tries to make herself feel useful. She spars with Hironori, babysits Tsunade. Throws kunai and shuriken into targets until her muscles cramp.

She sits in her father’s study, where the smell of him is still strong. She did not cry at his funeral but when she buries her face into the pillow of the cot he sometimes slept on, the pillow has no one to tell about her tears.

She rifles through his papers, his notes on jutsu. His handwriting was a tidy scrawl that is sometimes impossible decipher. But her father taught Noriko how to read and how to write and their scrawl is the same. So she transcribes his words to new paper in neater, easier to read characters.

New jutsu, chakra theory, invented taijitsu styles, her father has it all written down, all of it. She thinks to herself, this is what she can do. She can preserve his legacy by doing this, not by sitting around, an ornament to a family name.

She is transcribing journal on the art of war when a folded piece of paper flutters into her lap. The ink on the paper is smeared, but Noriko can clearly read the words ‘forced segregation’, ‘Curse of Hatred’, ‘Sharingan’, and ‘tailed beast control’. She purses her lips together, crumples the piece of paper, and puts in the waste basket.

She remembers absentmindedly, bringing an Uchiha boy the the compound after meeting him at an autumn festival. Her father had watched them play closely, but not more so than anyone would watch their child and a new friend.

Whatever Noriko’s father was, he wasn’t prejudiced. The Uchiha lived in their compound the same way the Senju lived in theirs, the same way the Hyūga and Sarutobi, Nara, did and so on. There was no forced segregation. She keeps reading her father’s journal, and keeps transcribing his notes.

And when she uncovers older, hate filled letters between her father and her mother, she skips them. Lets them yellow and age in the drawer she found them in.

There is no forced segregation. Nobody hates the Uchiha.

When Sarutobi finishes the war, Noriko gives the bulk of her work to him as a present. He has it copied down and put in the S-rank section of the library. He keeps the original in his office.

Tetsuya comes home. Tsunade screams when she sees her father. Hironori seems just as excited, if not more. Mito-oba-sama graces him with a kiss on the cheek.

Life goes on. Slowly, the village collects itself and breathes again. Noriko teaches herself her father’s taijutsu techniques from his notes. She teaches Hiro and Tsunade, when she’ll sit still enough to listen. She journeys outside of the compound and no one tells her to hurry back inside. Instead, they thank her for her sacrifice.

And when she passes by the Uchiha compound, she does her best to smile and wave. She reminds herself that there is no forced segregation. The Uchiha run the police department. They are in the compound by choice. It was a gift to them, she tells herself, from the Shodaime.

The war is over for a month and four days when Kazamatsuri Junichi asks her mother if he can marry Noriko. She has only met him in passing, but he comes from a small wealthy clan that migrated from Hot Springs Country before the war.

Senju Noriko is the spitting image of her father. She has not had many suitors. She cuts an imposing figure. Her silver white hair is cut in a severe bob and she lines her black eyes with kohl. She paints her lips red to match her eyes. She is tall, taller than Junichi. He looks up at her and beams.

“Tell me, Noriko-san,” he says, “are you a tree spirit?”

He makes her laugh. He never calls her by her last name. For as long as she’s with him, she forgets that she is Senju Noriko, firstborn and only child of the Niidaime, Senju Tobirama.

Junichi has orange hair and crooked teeth and he’s clumsy. But he is kind to her in a way that isn’t false or distant. He asks her what her favorite color is. Teaches her how to whistle with both of her pinkies at the corner of her mouth. His family gained their wealth as hired samurai but he never asks her about her swordsmanship. He never asks her about her training. Instead, he asks her when her birthday is and if she talks in her sleep and if she has a favorite poet.

He courts her for five days before she tells her mother that she will marry him. 

The preparations are made quickly. A house in the compound is prepared for she and Junichi to move into. Hironori teases her endlessly for being one of the people to add to the post war baby boom. Noriko twists his arm until he takes it back.

She packs her things with meticulous care to be carried to her new home. She walks the hallways, running her fingers over the grooves in the walls. She stops at her father’s study, and slowly opens the door in case she disturbs his ghost. Everything is as she left it when she last was inside. The desk is clear, books and scrolls tidily placed on their shelves.

Slowly, Noriko sits down at her father’s desk and presses her hands across the burnished wood. She remembers the days and nights he spent at this desk, remembers bringing him snacks her mother made him in the kitchen. Sometimes, he would lift her into his lap and ask her to read his work for mistakes. She would only understand half of what was written but she’d always tell him it was perfect. He’d kiss the top of her head and let her eat the apple slices her mother had cut for him.

She remembers the war days, sitting at this desk, trying to feel close to her father even when he was countries away. She presses down hard on the wood, trying to memorize the way it feels beneath her fingertips.

Something clicks.

A latch pops up. She narrows her eyes and raises a hand to guard her throat as she creeps her hands toward it and used her fingernails to tug it open.

Inside, are folders on each of the major clans Konohagakure currently houses.

Noriko puts a hand over her mouth. The Nara, the Aburame, the Shimura, all of them. Even the Senju. She has compiled lists of known kekkei genkai and clan techniques in exquisite detail. She also has clearly written notes on how to exterminate each clan in case of a coup.

The most detailed extermination plan is for the Uchiha.

Noriko holds the files in her hands, heart hammering hard in her chest. She knows her father has his Hiraishin seals on the Hokage Tower, all along the village perimeter, at the water reservoir, and the Forest of Death. They are everywhere a paranoid man, hardened by a lifetime of war would need them to be.

She grabs the Hiraishin kunai she knows is lodged in one leg of the desk and whirls away to Sarutobi’s office.

Four of his guards have kunai to her throat when she arrives but she only starts shaking when Hiruzen calls them off. She steps slowly forward, places the files on his desk, and whirls back away.

That night, she tells her mother she wants to move in with Junichi’s family. She cannot look her in the face. She bows on her hands and knees before Senju Genko and asks to be released into the Kazamatsuri’s open arms.  

She is Senju Tobirama’s only daughter and she and the Sandaime are the only people who know about the twenty plus contingency plans he has written out for every clan in Konohagakure. It is a secret that makes Noriko’s mouth dry. Her uncle believed in peace, but her father believed in people and their greed. This is proof.

Noriko thinks of the Uchiha in their compound. Of the Nara in theirs. And she wonders if the Senju have one to keep themselves in or to keep the others out.

She takes Junichi’s name not to dishonor her father. She takes Junichi’s name because her father’s legacy is not confined to the journals she transcribed and the jutsu that she managed to save. Hironori and Tetsuya, they are the spitting image of the Shodaime, in looks and attitude. They are charming and peace loving, family people. They are the Shodaime’s legacy in every way. They are compassionate and empathetic and helpful. They are leaders in the village. That is Hashirama’s legacy, left at his death, untarnished by the living.

But Noriko disrupted her father’s memory the first time she entered his study. Her father’s legacy is now the files on Sarutobi’s desk; the threat of violence against allies. If anyone ever knew about what she and the Sandaime know, her father’s memory would be tarnished by each clan he intended to harm in his contingency plans.

Noriko takes Junichi’s name because she is Senju Tobirama's only daughter, and she knows that some legacies are better kept quietly passed down than openly celebrated.

 

* * *

Kazamatsuri Sen and Ran are fraternal twins and they are inseparable. They like the same things, think the same way, and love to be around each other. They sleep in the same bed until they are five years old when their okaa-san firmly tells them they cannot anymore.

Ran is older, but only slightly. She was born mere moments before her brother. Their father says that Sen was born just so he wouldn’t have to be without his sister. They both have their father’s dark eyes, but Ran has their father’s orange hair while Sen sports a mop of unruly brown curls.

Genko-obaa-sama says they are wild children, spoiled by peacetime. But she always gives them sugar candies when their visits are over. Hironori-oji-san lets them use his arms as monkey bars, and every time he sees them he complains that they’re getting too heavy for him to lift. Tsunade-nee and Nawaki-nii always like to play with them, too.

One time, when Nawaki-nii is showing them how to make mud pies in Mito-obaa-sama’s garden, the earth beneath Ran’s fingers starts to quiver. They all crowd around to watch it tremble. Ran has a clump of wet brown dirt cupped in her two small hands when a single green shoot unfurls from the soil.

While Nawaki-nii is congratulating his sister, the hairs on the back of Sen’s neck stand up. When he looks over his shoulder, it’s to see Tetsuya-oji-san turn and walk into Mito-obaa-sama’s home.

Ran and Sen are called in to see the clan elders and the Sandaime when they are five years old. Sarutobi-sama looks at them both kindly, and asks Ran if she can reproduce the miracle she made in her great aunt’s garden.

She can. Sen cannot.

The elders of the Senju clan are dwindling. The only ones they recognize are Mito-obaa-sama and Tetsuya-oji-san. With a solemn voice, Mito-obaa-sama tells Ran that she will be moving into the estate at the Senju compound, and that a marriage with a distant cousin will be brokered at the earliest possible convenience. Tetsuya-oji-san will oversee her training.

Sen will stay at home with his mother and father until he presents his potential, but a similar match will he made for him. There is a chance, because he and Sen are twins, that he will have the Mokuton as well.

He doesn’t.

Ran meets her betrothed when they are six. Sen is not allowed in the room. Ran tells him that her betrothed is four years older than her, is the grand-nephew of Senju Touka, a cousin of their grandfather. His name is Izuku. He is a grim faced, black haired boy. Ran doesn’t like him at all.

Sen meets his future wife at home with his mother and father. Mito-obaa-sama is also in the room. So are his betrothed’s parents.

Her name is Nana. She has green eyes and is missing one of her bottom teeth. She is very polite. She is a more distant relation, but her early found talent with doton jutsu make her a viable candidate to birth a child who may possess the Mokuton.

Sen is convinced he won’t like her. In fact, he tells himself that no matter what, he will never like Komatsu Nana. And he doesn’t.

Their parents make them spend time together, but Sen is persistent. He doesn’t see Ran as much anymore and he’s not going to let Nana replace her. It isn’t until the day that he is practicing his calligraphy when Nana knocks his inkwell all over the low standing table that, that changes.

“You’re mean to me,” Nana says indignantly, ink looking over where Sen has been spelling his mother’s name. “But I’ve never been mean to you. You’re a bully and I hate bullies.”

Sen looks up at her, unsure of what to do next. He doesn’t know what possesses him to flick his still wet ink brush to get black spots all over Nana’s pretty pink kimono.

Nana tackles him.

They scrap, spilling ink all over the floor and each other’s faces and clothes. Nana fights dirty, pulls his hair and knees him in the stomach. She wins, gets her knee in his back and his arm twisted out behind him.

His parents find them like that.

Nana doesn’t visit for a week after that. Sen finds that he misses her company.

When she comes back, head bowed, Sen apologizes first. Friendship comes easier after that.

It’s a while before Ran can meet her, because it’s a while before Sen can get back to the Senju compound. The Kazamatsuri family lives across the village. Sen is tutored in shinobi arts by his mother, but his father teaches him the way of the samurai. He has no idea what his sister is learning.

They only see each other during festivals, holidays, and birthday celebrations. They write to each other, which seems strange to Sen. Ran is his sister, his twin. He used to know her like he knew himself. When they see each other, they spend as much time as they can together but it’s not enough. He can feel the distance build itself between them. His only consolation is that Ran and Nana seem to get along, and Izuku is only about half as mean as he looks. He knows his sister is in good hands at the compound, and with her betrothed.

It takes years, years before they can spend more than a few days at a time together.

Their mother calls Ran to their home when he and Sen are twelve. Ran’s hair is long now, braided and twisted into a severe bun at the back of her head. Her tidy appearance makes Sen feel foolish with his unkempt curls. But as soon as her guard leaves her side, she’s throwing herself into Sen’s arms. He hugs his sister like he’ll never see her again.

“Do you have any idea what okaa-san wants to talk about?” she asks.

Sen shakes his head. “Not even a little bit.”

Their mother tells her about their older sister. Her name is Yui. She has dark brown hair, and dark brown eyes. There is a picture of her on the floor in front of them. Their mother retrieves it from a solid cherry wood box that they have never been allowed to touch.

Smoke from their mother’s pipe clogs the room with the smell of cloves.

“When she was fifteen,” their mother says, “she ran off with a young man from one of the old wolf clans. A Hatake.”

Kazamatsuri Noriko expels smoke through her nostrils.

“She brought shame to both noble houses of her birth,” she says, “by breaking the marriage contract brokered for her when she was ten.”

Their mother produces another picture from her box. She slides it towards them. It is a picture of Yui and a young man with a long ponytail of white hair, only a few shades darker than her mother. Yui is pregnant. They are smiling.

“She is expecting her firstborn,” their mother says. “They plan to name him Kakashi.”

Noriko taps the picture of her oldest daughter and her husband and says, “Memorize their faces. You are never to speak to them.”

They don’t. Not even when Yui gives birth and begins to hemorrhage. Not even when the runner comes to their home and tells them she won’t make it to the morning. Their mother and father go, but Ran and Sen are left behind with a Kazamatsuri cousin to babysit them.

Years pass. They grow older. The peace that their grandfather died for slowly begins to fracture.

It is spring. Ran and Sen are seventeen. She tells him, weeping, a week before her own wedding that she is in love with Nana and that she cannot marry Izuku. Sen holds her hand and feels his heart fall in his chest. He is in love with Nana, too. But he can’t marry the girl his sister is in love with. Even if Ran is getting married herself.

He knows there is no way to stop the wedding. He tries. He prostrates himself on the floor before Mito-obaa-sama and begs. He is denied.

Ran and Izuku are wed. They both move permanently into their little house on the Senju compound. Ran becomes pregnant, but the child is stillborn. They try again, but the baby girl is sickly and dies when she is three years old.

The Second Shinobi World War begins.

Izuku is called to the front lines. Ran is sequestered in the Senju compound. They will not let her fight. She is Senju Ran, pregnant a third time and the last living Mokuton user. Tsunade is fighting, Nawaki is fighting, and so is Tetsuya. Soon, so will Sen and Nana. The Senju cannot afford to lose Ran.

Izuku dies on a mission with The White Fang, the man their sister married. His entire squadron is obliterated. Another Senju is dead.

Nawaki follows shortly thereafter. Nana and Sen are married quickly. They try for a week to conceive to keep Nana off the front lines. Sen does not want her to die.

When the first hint of a new, living chakra signature flutters in Nana’s stomach, Sen feels it first. He barges into the Senju compound, bypasses Mito-obaa-sama’s guards and demands the full protection of the Senju clan for his wife and infant child. His great aunt raised a single red eyebrow and acquiesces in silence. They must protect the bloodline.

Sen is not like his sister. He cannot manipulate wood or the trees like his great uncle. Instead, he is like his grandfather. He can feel chakra in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Niidaime. He is taken to the front lines after much of the fighting has been done. He becomes an invaluable scout.

Hironori-oji-san dies in the war. So does Tetsuya-oji-san. Sen is the last living male heir of the Senju. Mito-obaa-sama is an Uzumaki, and her longevity will make sure that he will not have to lead the clan for a long time. If Tsunade survives the war, she will be the new clan head with Dan, and her children. If not, it will fall to his own mother, to Noriko, only child of the Niidaime. If Noriko fails, then Ran. If not Ran, then her unborn child. If her baby does not live, then Sen.

They are dropping like flies.

The war ends. Tsunade disappears. Sen discovers later that Dan has died as well. 

All that is left of the direct descendants of the Senju brothers that built Konohagakure, are the younger brother’s heirs.

The child that Nana bears while Sen is away fighting, she names Umeko. She is a toddler with a fuzzy head of orange hair and curious grey eyes. She is so beautiful that the first time he sees her, Sen weeps. Sen does not know what becomes of his sister. He goes to the compound to see her, but she will not take any visitors. 

When the Third Shinobi World War breaks out, Sen is tired. This time, Nana must leave home to fight. He stays home with their little girl and his father, doing his best not to curse the day he was born. Because she is not pregnant, Nana is suddenly expendable again. Sen is not the only good scout in Konohagakure anymore, but he is the only male Senju. He is suddenly aware that he is being treated like a stud. If Nana dies, he can simply make another woman pregnant. He wonders how Ran has dealt with it all these years, only to have her children slip out of her fingers and into the shinigami's. 

Nana comes home from the war. Umeko pats the tears on her mother's cheek when she holds her daughter for the first time in what feels like forever. Sen wraps his arms around his family and prays for peace. 

He wants his family whole again. He returns to the Senju estate to ask for Ran to come home, back to the Kazamatsuri's. Mito-obaa-sama denies him. He discovers from his great aunt that the baby that Ran had carried during the second war died in her belly. That was when she began her self imposed exile, in her empty house on the estate, where the ghost of her husband and her dead children can haunt her in silence. Ran does not leave. Not very much. Not anymore. Their mother is visiting her there when the Kyuubi attacks.

The demon fox’s malevolent chakra is enough to sear itself across the backs of Sen’s eyelids. It is oppressive and thick and he can taste the smoke before the fox even rampages in Konoha proper.

Feeling the fox free itself is nothing compared to feeling his mother and sister die.

Their chakra winks out of existence like it was never even there.

Umeko is taken by a cousin to a shelter. Genko-obaa-sama was at an old Aburame friends when the attack begins, and gets to safety as well. Nana holds Sen’s hand for dear life as they stare into the mouth of a demon and pray they come out alive.

He can’t help but think the whole way through, that if Ran had lived, if the Senju hadn’t taken her for a broodmare, the casualties that Konoha faces would have been much less grim.

Sen is the last male heir of the Senju. He has a younger cousin named Kakashi that might take over the family if he dies, even if he is just a boy, even if he is the shame of Senju Yui.

But Sen lives, and Nana lives, and so does Umeko.

Some weeks after the attack, a blue and white slug named Katsuyu arrives at their doorstep. She reports the state of the Senju compound and asks if there are any remaining survivors of the once massive clan. Sen tells her about how they lost his sister and his mother, how he and his family are the last of them.

Katsuyu says, “Tsunade-sama requests that the Senju seat on the Elders Council remain vacated.”

Sen is astonished to know that his cousin is even alive.

“She would like the Kazamatsuri family to remain the Kazamatsuri family. For all intents and purposes,” the slug says, “she will be the last of the Senju.”

There are precious few of their clan still alive. Sen knows that it is safer if they stay as they are. The hokage knows where the Kazamatsuri claim their blood. Tsunade on her travels will draw one target on her back, rather than four on herself and Sen’s family. It is safer this way, to protect the clan in silence rather than to boldly call themselves what they are.

“Tell Tsunade-nee,” Sen says, “that we are happy to oblige her request.”

* * *

When Edo Tensei is used to bring the Niidaime back to life, Moegi doesn't see it. She feels it.

Something about the invasion has made her head hurt all day. She has been doing her best to get wayward civilians to safety, but there is an insistent throb that gets worse whenever she turns her face towards where most of the fighting is happening.

She is with Udon and Konohamaru, trying to move rubble to help a trapped civilian when something in Moegi breaks.

She breathes, “Umeko,” before she knows why.

In the next second, she is sobbing and she doesn’t know why until she knows why.

Moegi is a sensor and her sister has just died.

Udon and Konohamaru do their best to calm her down but Moegi is inconsolable. Her sister is dead. She just felt her sister’s chakra flicker out of existence and there wasn’t anything she could do to stop it. She reaches out with this strange, newfound ability, trying to find her parents. They are alive, thank God, they are alive.

It is easier to move forward after that. Easier to help others. After a while, after the fighting rages, it gets easier to feel the chakra signatures of other Konohagakure shinobi wither away into nothing.

When they all come back to life, the force of it knocks Moegi on her behind. They’re alive. All of them. She doesn’t quite know how that’s possible. But they’re alive. Naruto, somehow, somehow he saved them all. Moegi can feel her sister’s chakra again, dancing like an open flame. And she is crying again, getting snot all over Konohamaru’s scarf when he hugs her to calm her down, but Moegi is so happy she can’t even feel silly.

When the Fourth Shinobi World War breaks out, her joy comes to a grinding halt.

No genin under fifteen may participate in the fighting. Moegi is carted off with the too young, the too old, the inexperienced, the civilians, and the merchants to wait while the world unites for the sake of survival.

Her parents and her sister are too far away to feel. There is so much chakra on raging in the outside world. Her headaches become migraines and she spends too much time weeping. A career genin mother whose broken hip keeps her off the front lines, teaches her how to reign in her awareness to only the room she is in. Moegi is infinitely grateful.

The one thing she does feel, despite her shrunken scope, is the white hot burning wrongness of chakra that has fled this world returning against nature. Even though her migraines have gone, when the dead return impurely to life, their mangled chakra makes Moegi vomit every ration she had eaten that day.

When the delicate threads of the Infinite Tsukuyomi find them in the bowels below Konoha, Moegi dreams of her family playing card games at the kotatsu. With a cat named Mittens. Moegi has always wanted a cat. She forgets the feeling of impure chakra and impure techniques. Mittens is a tortoiseshell tabby. He is beautiful.

When the world wakes, the war is over. Tentatively, Moegi expands her awareness outward. She covers swathes of land, large enough to make even the Niidaime balk. She finds her sister. But her parents are nowhere to be found.

She learns from Umeko later that they died. Their cousins are gone, too. Her older sister tries to tell her how, but Moegi finds that she cannot listen.

Moegi and Umeko are alone.

They move their things out of their house and into an apartment in the orphan’s quarter. Umeko has been a genin for almost five years, so she has plenty of money saved up, not to mention their parents’ pensions. Neither girl can make themselves use the money. They don’t want a bigger place. If they had they would’ve stayed at home. But the Kazamatsuri house is a crater filled with ghosts.

Life goes on because it has to. That’s what their father always said his mother always said.

The academy isn’t up and running yet, but Moegi practices what the genin woman had taught her. She expands and contracts her awareness until she can see every individual chakra signature in Konoha. From the roaring inferno of Naruto to the tiny sparks of civilian children, she can feel them all. It is a strange gift, triggered by fear and stress. She doesn’t know where it comes from, but she’s grateful to have it.

It is difficult though. Moegi gets jittery when Umeko isn’t home when she says she’ll be. Umeko has night terrors that wake Moegi when the sky is still speckled with stars. They cope because they have to. At least they have each other. Countless others haven’t been so lucky.

“Life goes on,” Umeko murmurs one morning into Moegi’s hair.

She is rocking her back and forth. Moegi had dreamt about their parents, and woke up early to find herself in a stranger’s kitchen. She had screamed, rousing Umeko from an agitated slumber. Moegi’s bright orange hair in the dawn light was the only thing that kept the kunai is Umeko’s shaking grip from flying.

“Because it has to,” Moegi whispers. She hiccups into her sister’s shoulder and she holds on tight. Umeko doesn’t let go for hours.

The war is over for maybe six months when Moegi and her older sister are called to the Senju compound. They have never been before, have never had any reason to.

The Godaime hokage looks old but her eyes are still sharp. She looks at the girls in front of them and says, “It is good to be among family again.”

She shows them a family tree that sprawls from the Warring States Period to this very day. She lays it on the table before them, smoothing paperweights down at the lower edges. It is detailed, expansive, and ornately decorated. Moegi has no idea what it has to do with her.

“I hold the seat on the Elders Council for the Senju,” she explains, “but when I die, it will be up to you, my great uncles heirs to lead us into the future.”

Moegi can hear her heart hammering in her chest. She traces the branches of the family tree slowly. She starts at the bottom and tries not to leap out of her skin. There is her name and beside it, her older sister’s. There, above there is her father’s name, Kazamatsuri Sen, and her mother’s maiden name Komatsu Nana. Further back are Kazamatsuri Noriko and Junichi. She had never met them. Her grandfather died before she was born, and her grandmother died in the Kyuubi attack.

Her grandmother’s maiden name is Senju. There’s her mother, Senju Genko. Moegi’s great grandmother, she must have died before she was born because Moegi can’t place the name to a face.

The marriage line beside Genko’s connects to the name of the Niidaime hokage.

Moegi is a Senju.

“You have a cousin,” Tsunade says, “but he is of two noble clans and may only lead one.”

“Who is he, Godaime-sama?” Umeko asks.

“The Rokudaime,” Tsunade huffs.

Moegi feels lightheaded. The Rokudaime? Hatake Kakashi is her cousin?

“They are not on the family tree because his mother, your aunt, Senju Yui was not supposed to marry Hatake Sakumo. She was erased from the tree for this transgression.”

Tsunade takes a sip from the tea in front of her. Moegi is quick to copy, needing something to wet her suddenly dry mouth.

“I only know because I was there,” she says. “And Kakashi knows now, too.”

Moegi reaches for her older sister’s hand. Umeko’s fingers unfurl to hold her sister’s. Their parents are dead. Their parents are dead but they have family. Even if it’s just two more people, they are not alone.

“I have grown sentimental in my old age,” the Godaime says, putting her teapot down on the table. “This compound was rebuilt after the Kyuubi attack, and renovated after the war to thank me for my sacrifices. But it is a lonely place for an old woman to spend her days.”

Moegi squeezes her sister’s hand. Umeko squeezes back.

“I should like it,” Tsunade says, “if my big cousin’s granddaughters would call the place where we both grew up their home.”

Moegi thinks about their leveled house. She thinks of the names of cousins she and her sister have added to the family shrine. She thinks of their little apartment in the orphan’s quarter.

She thinks of Tsunade, a war hero two times over, growing old and dying by herself.

She looks to her older sister.

“Godaime-sama,” Umeko says, “we would be delighted.”

Tsunade chuckles and waves her hand at them.

“Please,” she says, “call me baa-chan.”

Moegi takes another few sips of her tea to steady herself. The question, when it comes, surprises her.

“Will we have to change our last names?”

Tsunade closes her eyes and says, “My heir must be a Senju not only in blood, but in name.”

Moegi - Moegi is grateful. Deeply grateful to have a home and to have an aunt and to even have the Rokudaime for a cousin. But she likes being a Kazamatsuri.

The fist that taps lightly on the top of her head is a surprise.

“Don’t worry, imouto,” Umeko says. “I’ve got your back.”

Her older sister looks to their new old cousin and with a look of fixed determination says, “I would be happy to bear the Senju name for you, Godaime-baa-chan, if you will gave me as your heir.”

“Besides,” Umeko says with a teasing lilt, looking down at Moegi, “Senju Umeko is a prettier name.”

Moegi learns, little by little. Tsunade gifts her a cherry wood box one day, and a cardboard box full of leather bound volumes. Her grandmother, Noriko wrote extensive journals in a tidy script. She had a lot to say about her father and the shinobi wars. She had even more to say about Moegi’s grandfather Junichi, and their children. The journals span lifetimes, and keep close track of Senju Yui, even though she was erased from the family.

Moegi reads about her aunt Ran and her troubles. But she also reads about the joys. Her aunt Ran and her father’s foot and handprints are pressed into the pages of the journal. So are Umeko’s in a different volume.

There is a world of fear and doubt and joy in her grandmother’s journals. It makes Moegi’s heart hurt, to see her victory and her pain and to know that it all ended very suddenly in this very estate.

In the cherry wood box, there are pictures of Moegi’s aunt Yui and her uncle Sakumo. There is a picture of little baby Kakashi, as well. There are little baubles in the box, keepsakes. A tiny pot of jet black kohl, and caked lip paint beside it.

Life on the Senju compound was never consistently joyful. Moegi learns this from her grandmother’s journals. Things are a little different now. Sometimes Kakashi comes over for dinner. And sometimes, he summons his ninken to play a terrible game called ninken fetch. After a little while, Kakashi stops reintroducing Moegi and Umeko to his dogs as allies and starts referring to them as pack. None of the dogs forget their name after that.

Tsunade trains Umeko to become the next clan head. They have her last name officially changed to Senju. It sends a wave of surprise through the village. Few had known the Niidaime had children, and that his children had children as well.

There are old kimonos that Umeko wears now, when she sits in on clan meetings. Tsunade gives her a low whistle when she appears in a dark blue one, laid with cranes taking flight, all shimmering silver thread and bright red accents.

“You’re just as tall as Noriko to pull that one off,” Tsunade says.

Umeko beams with pride. Moegi’s smile splits across her face.

She does not question her place on the estate for some time, mostly because there isn’t time. Rebuilding the village is difficult grunt work. She is a genin and she gets a decent portion of it.

It isn’t until she’s out in the village proper, helping a farmer lay his crops that it happens.

A little shoot. Tiny. Almost unnoticeable.

Moegi had been trying to use a suiton to help water the plants, but had gotten distracted halfway through and began forming the seals for a doton instead. The nature transformation happens because her body wills it. Moulding the chakra this way, accident and all, still feels right.

And then five more shoots reach out of the ground, vying for the sun.

Tsunade examines the shoots the next day and claps her on the back.

“They say it skips a generation,” she says.

Moegi can use the Mokuton.

It doesn’t change anything. Umeko is still older and is already training to become the clan head. Mokuton or not, she’s the better choice. There is no one left alive to teach Moegi how to use the technique the way she can, so she consults the library. It is there, in a book about witness accounts of the Mokuton that she finds a reference to a book in the S-class section.

She asks her cousin, the Rokudaime for permission to check it out anyway.

The book is a transcription of Senju Tobirama’s personal journals, rewritten and compiled by Senju Noriko before she married. The journal is thick, but Moegi devours it all. It gives her no clues about the Mokuton.

She is in the Rokudaime’s office, thanking him for his help but bemoaning her failure when he says, “I think I may have what you’re looking for in this office, Moegi-chan.”

He hands her a stack of yellowing papers.

“Go home and read it,” he says, eye crinkling. “You might find something enlightening.”

Instead, Moegi is horrified.

She learns everything she could possibly need to know about the Mokuton, but she also learns how to slaughter every clan in Konohagakure’s walls.

It is astonishing that her great grandfather could amass such knowledge without being distrusted by his entire village. Terrifying to think about what this information could do if it’s in the wrong hands.

Umeko, when she reads it seems to think differently.

“It means they trusted him implicitly, Moegi,” she says, laying the sheaf of papers down on her desk.

“No clan would let someone this close to their secrets if they thought that person was a threat to them,” she reasons, holding her chin in their hand. “Letting the Niidaime this close to their families shows how much the clans trusted him, not how much he feared them.”

She pinches Moegi’s cheek, and takes the papers to her next meeting with Tsunade. She leaves the pages on the Mokuton with Moegi.

Maybe it was trust. And maybe it was fear, too. Both can coexist beautifully in war time. Moegi has learned that with experience.

She teaches herself the Mokuton slowly. Yamato tries to tutor her on Kakashi’s suggestion, but their work is slow going. He was created directly from the Shodaime. Moegi’s blood is from the Niidaime. The Mokuton is not natural for her immediately. The nature transformation is wild energy within her that only sometimes wants to be tamed. But when she calls it to heel and means it, her two affinities fold themselves inside her hands and wait for her command.

Moegi restores the forests on the south side of the village by herself. It puts her in the hospital for three weeks with a severe chakra exhaustion, but she does it. But the looks on people’s faces when she passes them by afterward, they are priceless. She should not exist, this girl with orange hair and grey eyes. This girl who looks nothing like a Senju and does not carry their name but can wield their jutsu.

They are afraid of her. Just a little bit. But they trust what she’s done. She has restored part of the village that her great uncle built with this same technique.

And Moegi thinks that must’ve been what the clans of Konoha thought of her great grandfather. The Niidaime was a terrifying man, but he loved the village he helped his brother build. He created the academy, helped put the first volumes in the shinobi library, trained young shinobi and never sent children in the battlefield. He married and fathered a daughter within the village walls. Konohagakure was his heart. He died in defense of it. The Niidaime was a force to be reckoned with, but the reckoning only came in defense of what he loved.

Moegi is fourteen when she bows on her hands and knees before her cousin the Godaime and asks if she may have the honor of carrying the Senju name.

She has a legacy to protect.

**Author's Note:**

> i discovered that (through nature transformation) moegi could use wood release. then i found out she was a sensor type. and i remembered that tobirama was a sensor type. and then this ??? somehow happened. 
> 
> kishi's timelines are super fuzzy at times, so there's some squishing done here that i hope you'll be able to forgive. 
> 
> thank you for reading x


End file.
